“BEHOLD, I present to you the fabulous FAB, first of its kind! This thing will revitalize the frontier of Dust in ways you can barely even imagine.” Robert gesticulated vigorously.

Bec looked up, and up, and up. She craned her neck and still couldn’t see the top of this wild, paneled, piped behemoth of a machine. It seemed to violate all sense of reason extending to what seemed like forever.

This thing is ridiculously tall.”

“I’d hope so, we spent a pretty penny on a tall-erator to give it the roof space this baby needed.”

“Is that why we’re in a mountain?”

“No no no, this thing is far taller than the mountain in which it resides. We use the mountain for protection.”

“Taller than the mountain?”

“Yup. With a generous donation from Founder Altamira, we can extend the verticality of the space we’re in, which is crucial because the Fabric flows downward with gravity at no extra cost! By building tall, we can boost efficiency to a ludicrous degree!”

“What is the Fabric?”

Robert palmed his head and muttered, “the first nice visitor we get and she’s an amnesiac.” He waved the negativity away with a flick of his wrist and continued, “the Fabric is the oh-so-wonderful discovery of the Dust colony. All previous human settlements were entirely in Fabric-poor locations in space. Finally, the question that had confused astrophysicist for hundreds of years has been answered! Where is all the matter and energy that they were detecting but couldn’t see? The FABRIC!”

Robert seemed like he was used to explaining these things to people. Did he have to do this presentation to a boardroom at some point? He continued, “the Fabric is our sister universe, layered in 4 dimensions all around us. We lend it energy and matter and it lends us energy and matter. Finally, after stumping particle physicists and their ever-larger particle colliders, we know that right-handed neutrinos aren’t ‘too big to detect.’ Turns out we were looking in the wrong place! The pair’s hidden half was in the Fabric.” Robert swung his arm out, “Almost every amenity on Dust can be augmented by the Fabric. Everything from communications, computations, all the way to plumbing and air conditioning!”

“How is the Fabric used? What about my w-power?”

“Ah, fantastic question from my lovely guest upfront.”

Robert was getting far too into this, Bec thought to herself.

“Human exceptionality and anthropocentrism were often a point of contention for many of the great minds of the 21st century of the precolonial era. Worry no more, my fellow human! As all the animals transplanted to this world were given the genetic recombinance required for them to live on Dust, we found that many had developed a new organ meant to interact with the Fabric rich environment. We called it the textura! Species of animals all began to pull matter, energy and more out of the Fabric as well as funnel it back to whence it came! When we humans were given a textura, we found that we were truly different. While the animals of the same species typically manifest fascinating but singular ways to interact with the Fabric, we humans are all unique. The animals are born with the instinctual understanding of their quirks of reality, we humans are given a Word to decipher.”

“Why?”

“We can only speculate! The textura inside each human is only minutely different from any other humans, or even most of the animals, when it starts out, at least. Despite that phylogenic insignificance, we all get unique Words.” Robert tilted his head. “Well, mostly unique.”

“What makes us special?” Robert pointed to our head. “It’s language. It’s real, honest-to-Dust, complex thought. Apes have differing Words too, but they lack the diversity and abstraction that humans have, and that’s reflected in their Words. That’s the most accepted theory, anyways.”

“And this thing?” Bec gestures at the FAB.

“We’ve learned to study a person’s Word, and, with that knowledge, we can channel it into machines for fantastic effects like the tall-erator. It generates height. To describe the functionality of this baby, I’d have to lay out to you the dozens upon dozens of words that we’ve harnessed for use in it. In generality, this thing is able to weave the Fabric and deliver threads, generated by the City, to new settlements all over Dust extremely efficiently. No need to wrangle with the complex logistics of building a thread generator in the middle of nowhere, we can deliver all sorts of Fabric enabled amenities with only the need for a small receiver on the other end, installable with one trip of a car… or more realistically, a handful of people.”

Bec felt like she understood the value of that. She realized that there definitely could have been a Fabric-utilizing device to run her plumbing and lights in the trailer. Since it seemed like the machine that harnessed the Fabric for settlement utility was rather large, she could assume it must either scale well for single person use or, more likely, there was a Fabric battery. She couldn’t imagine how Fabric devices worked if they didn’t have any capacitance or whatever the word was to store Fabric. Could you store Fabric, now that she thought about it? Robert did seem to imply that it flowed and gathered. The word Fabric implies an almost tangible behavior to it. She would love to learn more about Fabric engineering later, but for now, she had an itching quest in the back of her mind. “What are the rules to a Word?”

“People could and have written textbooks on that!”

“Summarize them?”

“I couldn’t if I tried! But I guess, studying them for so long, I can confidently say that 1) it is hard to use a Word directly on something inside the body of something with a Textura.”

Bec crossed her arms. “‘Hard to use’ doesn’t sound like a rule.”

“Which leads me to my most important rule! 2) There are only rules until we find an exception! Words are so new and complex. We’re constantly finding exceptions that make us re-guess how they work. For example, the range rule was discarded when we saw people who could teleport to great distances and teleport things to themselves at great distances. The energy quotient rule was discarded when we saw people exerting forces that exceeded any logically predicted limit, heck, even a person teleporting away from the center of Dust’s gravity are generating a disgusting amount of energy. The intracorpus rule, a stubborn beast to articulate properly, had to be changed to ‘hard to’ because, well, people have been able to manipulate other’s organs, especially when they get close and come in contact with you. We can prove that by the healing-related and the,” Robert grimaced, “mind-manipulating Words. Not to mention the impact a Word has on its user.”

“It exhausts them?”

Robert shook his head and sighed. “No, if only Words ran on mana or stamina. They function as a reaction of the Fabric, a world comprised of matter and energy. From what we can tell, Words are a source of free energy and matter. It’s not free in a cosmological sense, but since energy flows between our dimension and the Fabric anyways, we can harness it to our heart—urm—textura’s content!”

“Limitless super-powers? That’s kind of… insanely dangerous.”

“The limit is the access to the Fabric.” Robert leaned in close to enthusiastically whisper, “which is almost everywhere!” Returning to normal volume, he continued, “The real limit is our minds, our imagination, our vision, our logistical capacity. That’s why having an AI assistant is so useful! People can do wonders when they can save time on thinking about the tedious stuff. Also, they make loads of money.”

“My AI will be able to execute my power for me?”

“Not unheard of, but more common assistance is accuracy, outcome prediction, data management, yaddah yaddah. Most people don’t like it when their assistants move their body for them so it’s usually just twitch stuff, reflexes, language usage, yaddah yaddah.”

“What about movement?”

Robert tapped his forehead with a finger. “Ah, you must have a very physical relationship with your Word! People find that the more Fabric they’re in contact with, the more powerful their interactions become, so moving will help. Of course, there are many exceptions to that concept. It’s such a misnomer that sections on it are more exception than rule! People can push and pull on the Fabric by practice, no moving necessary. People also repurpose this universe’s matter and energy to produce Fabric to make matter and energy of their own. This is likely why you’re leaking radiation of all sorts!”

“Right… Sorry.”

“No need to apologize, I brought you here as a diagnostic test for the FAB. You’re really messing with our machinery, in general, so I wanted to put the FAB’s shielding up to the test. I’ll give you something to stop that leakage after we’re done here.” Robert started to blather. “I heard a story about a train station on Earth where the clocks were constantly getting desynchronized. Engineers poured over what was causing the error and couldn’t figure it out. The way I hear it, it turned out that a farmer was shuttling cattle through that station that he had let graze too close to a radioactive zone, and the irradiated cattle were emitting particles that would flip bits in the computers nearby. Fascinating, isn’t it? You’re my irradiated cow!”

“You’re right! That is super cool.” Bec couldn’t care less about being called a cow. That was rad, hehe. Bec was starting to relax. She’d missed people telling her cool things. That’s what people are good for, if anything.

“Yes! I can see the enthusiasm in your eyes!” Bec noticed that, as Robert glanced between the FAB and Bec, his eyes flicked between blue and green.

“Are you doing something to me when you look at me? You know, the eye thing.”

“My Word manifests in disparate categories based on what I need in the moment. It was a defense mechanism that my body came up with to help with the complex demands of my Word. I’m not attacking you.”

“Would it be rude to ask you what your Word is? Or what it’s doing?”

“Very. But I’ll tell you a little bit that isn’t much danger to me… in exchange for something about your Word. Bec, the Word itself should be protected at all costs, once it’s out, it’s out forever.”

Bec decided to play ball, so long as he kept giving her more info. “Ok, my Word lets me hit things really hard, although I’ve only done it once and it nearly blew my hand off.”

Robert’s eyes were scintillating green as he stared at Bec. “Fascinating, I think I can tell a lot from that. Sounds like an energy-based power. You’re leaking stuff like gamma radiation, so I think it might be related to the EM Spectrum, at least partially. Still don’t know about how you knew about me, my gun, Orange’s power… of course, the bombs.” Robert tilted his head back and forth as he was thinking. “I don’t know, that may be unrelated to your Word since you begged me not to pry on that matter before you knew to hide the nature of your Word. The radiation? That for sure is related to your Word.”

“That may or may not be close.”

“It’s close,” Robert said with a grin. “I see it on your face.” Bec was perturbed by how easily he started piecing it together. She had to stop walking around like an irradiated cow!

“Bec, I have noticed a trend in his eyes. When he’s looking at technology, his eyes are blue. When he’s looking at you, his eyes are green. Except when he looked at the SensoLink inside you. He also had to grab you to do it which makes me think he can’t see internal technology without getting close. Maybe, even touching you.” Al said.

Bec wondered if she heard excitement. Was Al having fun with a puzzle? He is so special, I know it. He’s problem-solving!

“Is that so… veeeery interesting.” Bec adopted a ponderous tone, “Maybe Robbie over there has a power that lets him see and analyze technology. Maybe, somehow, it lets him analyze people, too. Perchance technology inside people is difficult for him to see. A blind spot, maybe?” Bec said this all aloud, mostly to get Robert’s goat. She felt like Robert had been invasive, in general, and finding out now that he’s probably ‘reading’ her, bothered her more than it should. This planet’s quickly building a picture of a very prying type of person trying to squeeze info out of any and all people they can.

Robert’s eyes betrayed how upset he was, even if his smile never broke. “Wow, and you figured that all out? Were you paying attention to how my eyes changed this whole time?”

“Nah, Al was though.”

“Al… oh, your AI assistant. That’s very impressive…” Robert was miffed but he stayed professional. “Typically, people don’t figure out as much about me as I figure out about them. I’m going to be honest Bec, you’ve kind of sparked a bit of my competitive streak in me. I bet you 25,000,000 LC that I’ll figure out your Word first.”

“I don’t have more than…” Al told her the value of her lot. “3,000 LC. Wait, that’s low… oh, my phone.”

“No matter, 25,000,000 LC for me. Let’s say 10,000 LC for you and, to let me look at the code for that AI that you’ve got there.”

“I don’t like debts but that seems like a wildly favorable bet for me. I’m in. One guess a week, plus a place for me to sleep and eat.”

“Deal, root words count as a successful guess. Oh, and just so you know, that’s only favorable for you if you win.” Robert snorted.

They shook on it.